How to write a successful blog that promotes business
There is no website without any content — either textual, visual or audial. Content marketing is a way to optimize your content for Google and be visible and easily found by a broad audience online. Blogging is one of the ways to keep content on your site fresh and up-to-date. It is also one of the ways to attract more potential customers. We have previously explained why it’s important to have a blog on your website, and now we want to give practical tips to those who have finally decided to run a blog to promote their own business.
Tips for a successful business blogging
Write for your business customers
Since you have a business blog, not a personal blog, your target readership is your customers: both existing and potential. Blogging helps turn potential clients into existing ones and boosts conversion rates. So, make it interesting and useful for those people by proving them with the insights into your industry, showing them ways to solve their problems with your products, showcasing the convincing benefits and explaining how it works.
Plan blog posting in advance
It’s useful to plan the topics of your future blog posts and the dates when you are going to publish them on a website weeks ahead. For example, try to make it a habit of drawing up a schedule for each month before it begins. This will help you provide equal intervals between moments when your new articles become presented on the web. Also, it will keep you from running out of ideas.
Blog frequently, but keep it short
Search engines value fresh content. Thus, the more often you update your blog (and your site), the better your rankings and online visibility will be. Sure, it’s hard to generate original content every day, but do it at least fortnightly. Once or twice a week is optimal.
It is better to write small posts (2000-4500 characters) often than long posts rarely. If the topic is too extensive, divide the material into two parts (e.g. Web terms for beginners. Part 2), or run a serie of thematic posts, and then readers will eagerly await the continuation in your subsequent blog posts. Run your blog on your website consistently and regularly, don’t let it drop for a while after you have started.
Use the benefits of different types of content
Frequently writing similar blog posts of the same type has two unwanted consequences: you’ll quickly run out of ideas and it’ll become boring for both you and your audience.
For example, besides interesting and informative tutorials or how-tos you can also write about your industry trends (as we did with SMM trends 2017 and web design trends 2017), resume your campaign or event or summarize your whole productive year or decade (e.g. our Drudesk 2016 wrap-up with infographics) and use other topics that stronger or weaker correlate with your business.
Visual information is eye-catchy, memorable and convincing. Thus, along with the text, include some infographics, charts, photos, images, collages, demotivators, memes, comics or compelling videos to diversify your blog.
Don’t underrate the power of catchy title
The title (or headline, or heading, or caption — whatever you name it) is the smallest part of your blog, but it nevertheless is the most vital part. It is the first thing that potential readers looks at, especially on the SERP. Sometimes headings on the site and the meta title in search engines are different, but both are important. This short line determines whether people will get interested and convinced to read your article or not.
If your title doesn’t manage to grab attention and persuade users to read ahead, then you can assume that your whole post was created in vain. However, beware of loud but untruthful headings that promise to reveal the secrets of the elixir of eternal life or stuff like that when it really doesn’t. This will falsely increase traffic but disappoint readers, whose trust will be difficult to win again.
A nice way to capture users’ attention is to formulate a title in a form of a question. Narrative sentences can also be useful. Inductive sentences encourage to take an action, so use more verbs than nouns (e.g. optimize your site instead of site optimization.) Remember client orientation, remind your customers about their troubles and intrigue them with your offered solutions, putting the main keywords in title.
Create high quality content
Producing content without grammar mistakes, distortion of facts and plagiarism is a way to be valued by both loyal users and search engines. Concerning the second, knowing the basics of search engine optimization, distinguishing SEO-myths and truth and realizing what Google considers to be good quality content will help you use keywords correctly, properly write meta tags, headings, subheadings and link anchors and do other SEO practices to make your blog posts SEO-optimized and Google-friendly.
Structuralize your blog content for better UX and SEO
Everyone will agree that a solid chunk of continuous text without any paragraphs or with too big paragraphs repel people and discourage them to read it or even to scan through it. The more structured a blog post is, the better user experience it provides.
To make the process of reading more convenient for users, don’t just divide your text into logical parts — paragraphs — but give names to those parts, using subheadings to help readers skip to the places they find interesting. Highlight important words and phrases with color, type them in bold, italics or with underline. Use numbered or bulleted lists.
Search engines also like well-structured content. To help crawlers better understand what is your blog post about and be easily found on the web, make your the most important heading on the top of page H1. Subheadings should be H2, sub-subheadings H3, and so on. Each heading and subheading should contain valuable keywords.
Link your blog posts with each other and external web resources
Hyperlinks help provide a better user experience, as they show users where they can find more useful information to save them from having to google it again.
Internal links encourage your readers visit more pages of your site. It could be links leading to other your blog posts, entirely devoted to related issues, or mentioned in a post containing a link. This way you don’t have to double previously covered information and you can increase traffic to your blog. Also, put internal links to your landing pages. If you keep an online shop, use links to your product pages or web forms for buying or offering goods to blend content and e-commerce right.
Besides internal links, external links to reputable web resources are useful as well. For example, when you appeal to some statistics like survey results to prove your thoughts, insert hyperlinks to the appropriate survey reports to strengthen your words and sound more convincing. If you want to get linked to your website, follow effective strategies of link building.
We hope these tips will help you run a successful business blog. If you have any questions concerning your website, feel free to ask our specialists.